A panel of experts at the third African Conference on Debt and Development (AfCoDD III) have argued that multilateral corporations in Africa are reported to be using the informal sector to evade tax.
As the executive director of Tax Justice Network Africa, Chennai Makumba, who was one of the panellists, noted that multilateral corporations were leveraging the informal sector to escape taxes, which was one of the reasons African nations were struggling to raise domestic resources.
According to estimates from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Africa loses significant resources as a result of illegal money flows (IFFs). These flows come from a variety of sources, including money made from criminal activity, tax evasion, profit-shifting abuse, trade mis-invoicing, and corruption, among others.
“Need to look at the structure of our economies, many of them have informal services and governments are struggling with how to capture these informal services sector.
“Certain companies use the informal sector to evade taxes, these are corporates hiding behind the informal sector that we need to target. Africa is losing about US$90 billion on an annual basis due to revenue loss,” Makumba said.
Briggs Bomba from Trust Africa, a different panellist, stated that the time had come for Africa to consider major ideas that would revolutionise the continent. Bomba emphasised the necessity for big-picture thinking in order to find solutions to the problems the continent was currently facing.
“This is a moment for Africa to manage our way and ideas and think big and outside the limitations of the ideas and out forwards ideas to help us. We should not be shy as activists in terms of these big ideas,” he said.
One of the techniques of most multilateral cooperations in this regard is “trade mispricing”: a situation where a company artificially sets the prices for goods or services sold between its subsidiaries to avoid taxation. Another approach to it is lobbying for tax breaks as a reward for basing or retaining their business in African countries.
Tax regimes across the continent have been observed as possible factors for the decline in investment, and public revenue shortage that hinders development. Senegal, Kenya, and Nigeria are among the countries that recently announced tax reforms. But beyond the expansion of the tax net to include more “common men” or the middle class, policy efforts must be driven to capture what’s due to the state from corporate citizens like multilateral cooperations.